The Google Trends blog post got 55 hits on the day it was published but it did not feature highly in Google results for either of the Hot Trends keywords (‘Mark Webber’ and ‘Michael Jackson’s autopsy picture’) we were trying to take advantage of. On the other hand, the good news is that, at the time of publishing, we’re on the second page of Google AU for ‘Google Trends’ and in pole position for ‘Google Trends SEO’. Woo hoo!

Why?

• There are 9,949,000 other websites out there that contain information on Mark Webber, including www.markwebber.com, Mark Webber’s unofficial forum, Mark Webber’s Facebook profile, etc, etc. Disturbingly, there are 846,000 results on Google for ‘Michael Jackson’s autopsy picture’. (The fact that there are so many listings on Google for ‘Michael Jackson’s autopsy picture’ is all the more amazing when you consider that no such image exists on the internet…yet.)
• Neither of our hot keywords was in the title of the blog post, whereas ‘Google Trends SEO’ certainly was.
• Our blog does not usually contain information on either Mark Webber or Michael Jackson and so the keywords were out of context.

So what can we conclude from this experiment then?

If you’re blogging for SEO purposes, write about topics that are relevant to the rest of your blog. This way you will build on your ranking for existing targeted keywords and keep your regular visitors interested. Your blog will seem rather spammy if it’s seen to be chasing popular, irrelevant keywords. And, lastly, make sure your important keyword or keyword phrase is in the title of your blog post so that it can be ranked highly by the search engines.

If you’ve found this post useful or if you’d like to tell us how you found this blog post, please post a comment.

 Answer: They are both current top search queries on Google.

How did we know? Simple, we used a couple of Google tools: Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. They are free, simple to use SEO tools on the internet to help you research the popularity of particular keywords on Google.

Google Trends measures how many searches have been done for specified search terms in relation to the total number of Google searches done over time. The results are then presented as a graph. The Hot Trends tool shows which search terms and keyword phrases are popular right now and is updated hourly. ‘Michael Jackson autopsy picture’ was the 4th most popular search term at the time of writing – a rather gruesome insight into what intrigues the US internet audience.

Google Insights shows which top keyword phrases, or ones that are rising in popularity, are being used over a specified period of time and where. So, for example, you could find out at which point in the year people are searching for beach holidays and compare the results by region. At the time of writing ‘Webber’ was the number 2 rising search term on Google Insights for Australian internet users, reflecting the Australian driver’s recent Formula 1 success.

A word of caution though:  The use of random hot keywords may net a larger volume of visitors than usual to your site, but they are likely to achieve a high bounce rate once visitors realise that your site does not contain the information they are looking for. In addition, Google Trends only really highlights the keyword phrases that are most popular in the USA. Remember too that the keywords that are most popular today or this week may not be as popular next week and so your article may not have as much longevity as it might otherwise have if it were targetting a more long term keyword, i.e. that people might search for in the future. Try to use a keyword that is relevant to the subject matter of your website.

Which leads us to the purpose of this blog post: After publishing this post we will be keeping an eye on the amount and type of traffic – if any – it gets as a result of using these two popular keywords. Watch this space….